Choose Your Own Bar Stool Adventure

The Apple-Gizmodo saga has certainly raised eyebrows over the last few weeks, and brought up various issues of journalistic integrity. Though a myriad of outlets have covered the story, none have provided a take as amusing as the Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style hypertext account by Dan Nosowitz.

From the beginning, you can choose to dismiss the whole story as a publicity leak (resulting in a Game Over) or continue listening to hear more.

It’s interesting how the denial of content through the game over mechanic greatly influences your decisions and alignment within the story. This is true of all games to some extent, but a simple shift in which decision constitutes a game over easily sways what the player must think if she wants to continue the narrative.

To be fair, this exists in other forms of media as well—one can always choose to close the book—but the conspicuousness of this decision in games is unique and interesting in its relation to the player-avatar connection.

by Mark Wernham. Machine #69 recalls Ryman’s 253, and especially Bob Arellano’s Sunshine ’69 both in its embrace of arbitrary connection and its fond nostalgia for the era when cheap booze, good drugs, fast cars and hot guns seemed to offer everything worth wanting and when nothing was worth wanting very much.

A new hyperromance for the Web. Sparsely linked, La Farge’s new hypertext nods at Stephanie Strickland’s design and to Michael Joyce’s direct address to the reader. but brings a new voice and sensibility to Web fiction.

Multimedia notes from underground, where a traumatized girl furnishes a cozy space in an underground tunnel. Script by Lynda Williams, music and code by Andy Campbell and Matthew Wright. A web work that’s especially nice on the iPad. (The floor lamp is a nice allusion. Get it?)